Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Seasons, years, a century; bones into sand. He was young, he was moist. Weed-flowers breaking through the cobbles, splitting the black stone slabs. The church tower overbalances, topples towards him: a crisis, moral vertigo, a new fear. The tower is flint: shechita blade, white ashlar blocks. And now — as he rests in the elbow-chair, at the fogged window, worrying the grey muslin between his finger and his thumb — she covers his eyes with her hands. Trust. Warm, fresh bread. Clay. She draws them, suddenly, back. No warning. And he is pained. With light. The chamber streams with uncurtained brightness.

There was no hope for him this time. The serrated brilliance of snow. The pain! The white angels. The chipped and mutilated congregation of the dead, the witnesses. Casually severed fingers, fallen into the slush, are carried deeper into the undergrowth by disappointed scavengers. A thought fox, an outcast. Brambles bleed the plaster ankles.

Undefended outlines. Ghosts of objects that have disappeared from his memory. Unnamed shapes that he cannot use. He is driven back upon the bed, an ice hand cupping his heart — drawing it from him, a virgin’s lantern. His breath screams. He is drowning in silt. Choking. Yellow blood. A snow of muslin.

She is forcing the slit of his bag. She has all the bright instruments; the secret tools, forbidden implements of power. The touching sticks. The bones of chrome. The perfected edges. His knowledge. She has leeched him of his will. But she cannot see these hieratic weapons. She can know them only by stitching her eyes, by moving in the thick certainty of darkness. This ceremony is the re-enchantment of life. The scalpel follows the heat-path of the scarlet tracings she has already inflicted upon his white skin.

The threads of his being are drawn out from his belly. He must reclaim the dream that was her existence. She is no longer trapped in his story, like a fly in amber. He is quite ignorant, he does not know her. He is effaced by a sudden scatter of snow. An unrecorded effigy on a dissenting tomb. His small heart. His heart-bird lifts. The threads are unpicked; he is scattered. The moisture of life. Her lips press against his wounds.

She looks from, and she rests in, the prescient socket of his eye.

She holds, in her hands, the womb — in which she should have been conceived: she is reborn. A dream of life. A key turning in a well-oiled lock.

In the elbow-chair, bare-legged. The glow of dissatisfied embers. Black kettle with a transmuted spout. Something shapeless and made from felt is smouldering in an open grate. The guttered stub of a candle in a broken wine glass. A cracked pane in the window, cold air belling the muslin. She wraps herself in darkness. The room closes on her; she has no further need of it. The intensity of that single moment scorches her lips. There is nothing more to say. The shadow of the church tower falls uselessly across an empty chair.

‘Murder — Horrible Murder!’ Shout at the dead. The door, bolted from the inside, is broken down: the servant (blood on his gloves), men in uniform, neighbours, barking dogs. A gay woman, an unfortunate — disembowelled. Throat cut to the spinal cord, kidney on thigh, flesh stripped from the ankles. Horror ! Lock it, seal it, bury all trace.

Where is the surgeon? Gone, vacant: an empty house. Seizure? Madness. He is confined: there is no life in him. He stares into a frozen fishpond, his mouth agape. Toothless, spoiled. He is absorbed in a cup of cold water. He exists only in the vapour of the clouds racing through the high windows. Where? Anywhere, nowhere. Leytonstone. Whipps Cross.

Footsteps on the cobblestones, and a single knock at her door. The dream of a perfect murder fades.

VII

Beneath the odd, parchment-shaded lamp, a meniscus of pale light: the room quilted in bulky darkness. The bundle of blue papers has stuck to my hands in a single block, heavy as stained glass, interleaved with lead. Millom’s face is bestial. He insinuates, whispers, rasps: fixes me with his sunken, chalk-rimed eyes. His fleshy lower lip shivers in a mime of humour. He is amused. He leans over; his buffed pike-teeth glinting voraciously. White hands break free of his cuffs, to flap around the lamp, as he signals his triumph. ‘Gotcha!’ He has implicated me in horror, infected me with a small corruption from which there is no immunity.

‘You understand the nature of her triumph? Yes?’ Millom preached, determined to poison the silence with a redundant afterword. ‘It was indifference : “surviving death through death”. The blind surgeon wanted something that excited him more than honour, more than sanity, more even than life. He wanted the one crystal absolute she denied him — yes, apathy; he wanted it so much he was prepared to pass over the borderline of identity, become her, and suffer her vengeance within her flesh .’

No. I didn’t want to be drawn into giving mind to this fiction, but it seemed to me that Millom was wrong, completely wrong. As wrong as it is possible to be. I repudiated his terms: ‘vengeance’, ‘apathy’. I could only read the crucial ‘exchanges’ between the woman and the surgeon in terms of the madness of love-death — the ‘little deaths’ of physical ecstasy. Within this tale, the woman exploits those out-of-the-body post-coital experiences, where both partners become the loved one and the lover: the metaphysical poets’ mingling of souls. Through the focus of repeated ritual acts the woman infiltrates the surgeon/father’s consciousness — so that, when the inevitable moment comes, she takes responsibility for her own death; leaving him with nothing, an achieved emptiness.

‘The woman, the woman,’ Millom twitched on. He was talking to himself. Without having ‘written’ anything, he found himself an author. His performance was magisterial in its self-deceit. ‘The woman allowed the surgeon to enact the deed that was his inescapable destiny. She could not change the events of history, but only the meaning. In the freedom of death, she used her more potent memory, her older soul, to avenge herself by trapping the killer in the seductive mirror of her youthful skin. His sightless blunder damned him. His act of sacrificial slaughter, releasing her (as he thought) from an inherited taint, was, in fact, the very movement that brought him down, crushed his over-weening pride. You follow me now? He is the man, and he is still “alive”. He has no need of a name; his identity is transferable, so he’s immortal. He wanders the city, seeking out the fatal woman, like a benign host desperate for the only satisfying plague bacterium — the one that is fatal. Hopelessly, in drinking clubs and hotel bedrooms, he feels the contours with his trembling hands, face after face after face, searching for his own earlier self, his woman soul. He is prepared to commit any crime to avoid the dreadful ceremonies that have already taken place .’

Millom brought his jerky moth-catching hands together in a clap of self-satisfaction: he sealed the circle of morbid light. ‘Am I wrong? Only the dead have the time adequately to revenge themselves. Their sense of honour is older than the sun; but the damage they inflict upon the dream of their lives is terrible. They die in obedience to some posthumous whim.’

It may have been the unconvinced nature of the light in this room, or some failure of nerve among my retinal fibres, but it now appeared that the manuscript sheets had lost their colour: the lines had faded and the blue escaped. Millom’s double-spaced, tightly controlled Italic script had narrowed, spidered, speeded into an over-familiar black scrawl; a sequence of Bic-incisions intended for decoding by the author alone. The manuscript was in my own hand . The writing of this tale had nothing to do with Millom, nor with the ‘Prima Donna of Spitalfields’. It is mine: lost or suppressed. But I have no memory of its composition. The risks were too great. I had sworn to finish with all this compulsive nightstuff. I locked the story away, and dropped the key into the canal. How then had it come into Millom’s hands? If he was ‘communicating’ with anyone it was not the dead. I discounted the possibility that he (or his agents) had simply broken into my house and stolen these papers, from among all the stacks of ruin. Could John Millom have evolved some psychic ‘fax’ machine, the ability to invade my sleep? Was it possible that I functioned, in some ugly, involuntary way, as a scribe to the worst of the sites that I was foolish enough to visit?